The “flowering-war” image in Mexican poetry becomes one of the basic symbols of Nahuatl spiritualism. As Laurette Séjourné summarized it in her book Burning Water, “To reconcile the matter and spirit of which he is formed, individual man must all his life keep up a painfully conscious struggle; he is a battle-ground in which two enemies confront each other pitilessly. The victory of one or other will decide whether he lives or dies; if matter dies, his spirit is annihilated with him; if spirit wins, the body ‘flowers’ and a new light goes to give power to the Sun. … This ‘flowering war,’ continually renewed in every conscious creature, is symbolized by two divergent currents, one of water, one of fire – which at last unite.” The actual military orders of Eagles & Jaguars would then be taken as prototypes of those enlisted in that struggle: on some “real” battleground (in the later & grotesque Aztec view of it) or in man as “meeting ground of opposing principles, which die in isolation when they are removed from it.” … The imagery & ritual of flowers continue into contemporary Mexico, e.g. in the Huichol peyote songs (“where the roses are born / where they flower / garlands of flowers & wind”) & in those from the Yaqui Deer Dance (“out there / in the flower world / the patio of flowers / in the flower water”).

[Originally printed in Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas. The book, first published by Doubleday in 1972 & last by University of New Mexico Press in 1986 & 1992, has now been out of print for several years.]

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